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Saturday, August 25, 2012

Birthday Week 2012

Another birthday week has come and gone. I know I’m spoiled rotten/five years old but I LOVE my birthday. I love my hubby even more for going all out year after year. This year’s celebrations included multiple dinners with friends & family, a vacation from kitchen duty, some sweet gifts, and the highlight – my baptism! Here’s a brief recap of the fun-filled festivities:

On the Friday night before my birthday, we met the Sullivans for dinner at Panera Bread. It’s always a great time when our families are together. Ben & Emily were especially giggly and were having some pretty cute conversations. They are growing up too fast!

On Saturday, the Collins family came to town! We met them for lunch at MARTHA’S!! (You have to shout the name – it’s a rule). Just like the previous night with the Sullivans, we were reminded of how big our families have gotten. Table for 10, please. Yikes!

After lunch, we headed to the Means’ house for my baptism. You can read all about that here – but I’ll just say again that it was AWESOME… and God is awesome! The Collins stayed with us that night. We ordered pizza for the kids and Lauren & Mary came over so that Aaron, Liz, Brian and I could grab some dinner and see a movie. Before we left, Brian surprised me with a cake – so we sang and let the kids dig in!

We headed to Pappadeaux’s and it was YUM-MY. I won’t go into what movie we saw after that, but it was terrible and I felt gross after watching it. This was the only disappointing moment during an otherwise wonderful week.

On Sunday & Monday, Brian worked, but he took over with the kids as soon as he got home and just gave me a break. He did the meal plan, grocery list & shopping for the week. On Monday night, he and the kids brought me a toy frog with a Happy Birthday tag on it. I stared at him, confused. He said that we were going to eat at Freddy’s, then I could take as much time as I wanted to catch up on the blog. Freddy’s + Blog = Frog (apparently). Brian has an unusual fascination with word play. Regardless – you’ll notice that I did a lot of catching up on the old blog that week!

Tuesday was my actual birthday. I already had the day off, because I believe it should be against the law to work on your birthday. Brian surprised me and also took the day off. This led me to the conclusion that it should also be against the law for your significant other to work on your birthday. I wonder how hard it would be to get this ground-breaking legislation in front of Congress?

Anyway… we just had a great family day together. Brian and the kids took me to lunch at Los Patios (courtesy of my awesome Mama).

Grace is obviously too cool for Los Patios.

Noah was a big fan of the Al Fresco dining.

Ben gave us a lesson in camouflage.

This was our best attempt at a group shot. Do you see those little plates of biscuits? They are why I go to Los Patios. They are “slap your mama” good. Lucky for my mama... she wasn’t there.

There are lots of squirrels at Los Patios because they also love the biscuits. Coincidently, I love squirrels. So when I’m at Los Patios, all I do is win.

Here, squirrely squirrely squirrel.

We opened presents when we got back home. I asked for this:

And Brian also got me this:

Can you believe that he picked it out all by himself?! I love it!

He also surprised me with a massage and pedicure at my favorite little spa place that afternoon. He fed the kids while I was doing that, and then we had a stay at home date once they were tucked in for the night: take-out and the movie “Bernie”. It was hysterical! Please rent it. You won’t be sorry.

The rest of the week continued with lots of relaxing family time and a little bit of craziness as we prepared for Ben to start school the next week. Brian and the kids made me feel so very special and reminded me, again, of how blessed and lucky I am to be a part of this wonderful group of people that are my family.